


We Must Speak in Fragments

by alSaqr



Category: The Lovecraft Investigations
Genre: Canon Compliant, I’ve only heard ‘The Lovecraft Investigations’
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:40:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27877749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alSaqr/pseuds/alSaqr
Summary: Dr Jonathan Willet is visited by a woman who somehow got into his room unnoticed.
Relationships: Kennedy Fisher/Matthew Heawood
Comments: 8
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

Some days, he was lucid. Those days were the worst.

Dr Jonathan Willet would lay in his bed, remember that he was in an asylum, and remember why there was a lock on the door. And on those days he would judge himself and find himself wanting, and he thought that perhaps that feeling was worse than the madness. Worse than delirium and severe dissociative episodes (so he’d been told). Because when his mind was under his own control and he was not moving from fragment to fragment, he was forced to think about what he had done. And what he had done was unforgivable in the eyes of-

Of who? _God_? He didn’t want to believe in God, not anymore. He wanted, desperately, to forget that God existed. Because he was not the beardy God with flowing robes and gentle hands and overflowing forgiveness. The God that Jonathan knew would not welcome him into his father’s home or cleanse him of his sins (and oh, did he have sins) or grant him eternal peace. He was not the man his mother had taught him about, who he had denied in college, and who he had found again, when his parents passed.

No, the God that spoke to him, these days, was a laughing, mocking God; a being of pure evil and raw power who would give him no peace. No reprieve from the error of his ways, and of a shattered and fragile reality. The only reality that was, and yet somehow, still false. Already lost. And that God visited him whenever he closed his eyes, whether it was visiting hours or not. He did not abide by the rules. The men in white coats could not halt his movement.

No one could.

And so the lucid days were the worst. Not just because he was left with his own conscience, but because he could analyze the madness. So when he had a visitor on one of those days who had _not_ entered through the door and who had _not_ been there a couple of seconds ago... well. Perhaps insanity might have been kinder.

“Dr Willet, I presume?”

Jonathan closed his eyes, counted to ten, and then opened them again. The woman was still there. Which didn’t so much mean that she was real, these days; his mind was not what it once had been. But it at least meant that if she wasn’t, she was a very _persistent_ hallucination. Because he could see her.

And he didn’t see much of anything these days, not since going blind.

“Last time I checked,” he laughed, closing his eyes again and refusing to ‘look’ at her. It hurt his head to think. Why could he see her? Was she another creature sent by God to torment him?

“Always wanted to say that.” The woman scrunched up her nose with a grin, lowering her voice as she repeated: “Dr Willet, I presume.”

“Who are you…?”

“I suppose you’re asking yourself,” the woman continued, as though she hadn’t heard him, “what’s going on, why can I see? Bit of a bastard that Tilingast fellow, wasn’t he?”

Jonathan frowned, his psychiatrist hat back on. Like he was trying to coax sense out of an unbalanced patient.

It felt strange to be on the other side of the chair again.

“Are you saying he’s-?”

“Dead as a door nail. _Strange_ phrase, isn’t it. ‘As a door nail.’” Jonathan opened his mouth and shut it again, at a loss as to what he was _supposed_ to say to this… apparition. “As if door nails could be alive or dead.”

“Who _are_ you?” he asked again, baffled. Hackles rising he sat up in his bed, almost scrambling in his haste to put distance between them. Back pressed up against the wall he shook his head, and began repeating his own mantra to himself. “And the Herald is a tricky one, a _tricky_ one.”

“I have nothing to do with _him_ if that’s what you’re worried about,” commented the woman, casually, as though _his_ name did not strike the same fear into her as it did him. “Well. Not _nothing._ But, y’know.”

“You have seen the Herald…”

Her eyes widened in horror. “ _Fuck_ , no! I’m not that clumsy. But,” she folded her eyes and looked him over - how could he see? How could he _see_? “He’s certainly been tooling around in _your_ mind, hasn’t he?”

Jonathan couldn’t help it; he was intrigued. With some almost forgotten instinct activating in the back of his mind he swung his legs over the side of the bed, and tried to pretend that _seeing_ was normal. He gestured to the screwed-down chair at the desk he was allowed, and the woman took it as he sat on the edge of the bed. He rested his head on his interlaced hands, assessing her as if she was a patient of his. She was making about as much sense as Thomas Marsten or Charles Ward, but now he knew more, rest his soul. _They_ , apparently, had known what they were talking about - not him. And so what did this woman know, who knew the Herald and could get into a locked asylum prison cell?

For a few minutes, they just watched one another. The woman seemed to be thinking about something, and Jonathan was trying to decide where to _start_ his line of questioning. She was clearly reluctant to answer ‘who are you?’ He didn’t like that. But would she have _any_ answers he asked of her, or was she here to pass on some message that would just make his life worse and more complicated?

He thought about the podcaster. Matthew Heawood. _He_ would have been Jonathan’s next patient, once upon a time. Would his engagement in this esoteric mess lead him to being his neighbour in the asylum, eventually? Did the woman know about _him_? Coincidence seemed unlikely.

“So. _You_ have seen some things you shouldn’t have, haven’t you Dr Willet?”

“I have seen-”

“The face of God, yes, yes. I’ve listened to the podcast.” She waved a hand. “But forget all that, it’s not quite… right.”

Jonathan laughed, high and mad. “It’s real. None of it’s real.”

“Well, you’re _almost_ on the right track there,” frowned the woman. “It’s one of the two.”

“Why are you here?”

“Because I’m curious?” She shrugged. “Because I thought you might want to talk to someone who believes you?”

Her voice was almost kind. But she was sincere. They were always sincere, whether they believed in the Herald, or didn’t believe that Jonathan knew what he was talking about. He wanted to believe in her; it made a nice change from having to talk to psychiatrists and psychologists who pretended to humour him. But he was learning that you could trust no one, and certainly not people who offered to be your friend.

“Haven’t they told you?” He laughed again, though this time, it was more than a little put on. He stared at the wall behind her head. “I’m _mad._ ”

“Oh, as a hatter!” agreed the woman, cheerfully. “But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”

“So you _have_ seen…” Jonathan’s eyes widened in disbelief and horror. Tilingast knew, but hadn’t seen. Heawood didn’t believe. Charles and Thomas had seen, but they were gone. “Dust, dust, all dust. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

He could feel the woman’s gaze on him. She knew, and she had seen, and most importantly: she didn’t seem to be insane. The Doctor in him was dancing with delight. If she could make sense of all of this - explain it, without dismissing it - then perhaps he could finally get some _sleep_.

He couldn’t jeopardize this. Couldn’t scare her away, like her had junior psychologists brought in to watch his sessions. Conjuring up every bit of professionalism that he had once had, he sat back on the bed and fixed her with a level stare.

(It felt good to be able to see again. Even if it _was_ a trick, it was one he could at least do his best to enjoy.)

“We must speak in fragments.”

“Fragments?” The woman laughed, crossing one leg over the other. “You can talk freely, Dr Willet, we’re not going to be interrupted.”

“But they can _see._ ”

“My side have methods of… bending the signal, as it were.” She pursed her lips. “That’s not quite right, but as an explanation, it’ll do.”

“The Herald-”

“Cannot see,” she confirmed, gently. “So, let’s talk.” She held out a hand for him to shake. Jonathan took it tentatively, and tried to smile. “My name is Parker, Dr Willet. And I’m very interested in what you know about Nyarlathotep…”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kennedy reads the newspaper, and Matt diffuses a panic attack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A sort of sequel to the first chapter that came to me in the shower, semi requested by bearskald. Maybe this'll become a series, or maybe it won't; we'll see how the muse strikes.

“Holy  _ shit _ .”

Matthew Heawood looked up from the computer, tilting his head to one side as he lifted one ear of his headphones away from his head. He looked at Kennedy Fisher, one eyebrow raised in surprise. She was usually pretty stringent about not talking too loud when he was messing about with his audio software. There had been that one time she’d taken a phone call when he was tidying something up, and they’d thought she’d been quiet enough and then found out after the fact that the audience could hear her talking to her aunt in the background of one of his narrating bits. After that, she’d gotten into the habit of not being in the room when he was working and didn’t need her at  _ all _ , and in fact he was fairly certain that she  _ hadn’t  _ been, when he’d begun. But now here she was standing in front of him, staring boggle-eyed at a newspaper as though it had just bitten her.

He pressed pause quickly, shrugging the headphones off and tossing them to the table as he leapt to his feet. Crossing the room in just a few long strides he took her by the arm - aware that she didn’t like to be touched without warning, but that it was  _ him  _ \- and looked Kennedy in the eyes, all concern.

“Kennedy, what is it?” He prised the newspaper out of her hands, skimming the page to see what had gotten her worked up to the point of swearing. “What happened?”

Kennedy snatched the paper back, turning it around and pointing at a small photograph taking up the bottom corner of the front page. She tapped it insistently, all but putting her finger through it, and as he squinted at the details Matthew’s jaw dropped.

“Is that…?”

“Dr Jonathan Willet,” confirmed Kennedy, nodding. “Read the headline.”

Matthew read the bold, capitalized letters in growing disbelief, and then the small caption under the photograph that directed readers to page four to read more.  **AMERICAN PSYCHO - LUCY HAWTHORNE’S KILLER TRANSFERRED TO NEW FACILITY** capped a picture of Dr Willet, blindly facing the camera as someone led him down the stairs of Broadmoor Hospital. His face was lit up by the unmistakable glow of a flash photography, but that wasn’t the strangest thing about it. Matt took the paper from Kennedy’s hands once again, watching her out of the corner of his eye as she folded her arms across her chest and tapped her foot nervously. That someone who was leading him. Their face wasn’t entirely in focus, but he was  _ sure  _ that she was familiar, somehow. It was her stature, or the cut of her hair; but not someone he’d remembered seeing in the hospital before, when he’d visited. Then why was she…

His eyes widened in recognition, and Matt looked from the newspaper to Kennedy - who was nodding furiously - and then back at the paper. Shaking his head he swore under his breath, sinking back into his comfortable computer chair as Kennedy perched on the edge of his desk (where he would ordinarily have told her to move).

“If I’m not mistaken-”

“And I’m very certain you’re  _ not _ …” muttered Matthew, darkly.

“Dr Willet’s new ‘doctor’,” Kennedy gestured at the paper again, “looks an  _ awful  _ lot like a certain someone we’ve not heard from since Rendlesham Forest.”

And the woman was, now that he had figured it out, an absolute dead ringer for Parker. Matt ran a hand across his face, trying to figure out what that  _ meant _ . Was she just looking into Willet because  _ they  _ had been? Or was the mysterious ‘Department’ interested in him for their own reasons?

“What do you make of it?” asked Matt, carefully, watching Kennedy for some sign of an anxiety attack. Her mouth was tight and her eyes narrowed, but she seemed to be breathing okay.  _ More frustrated than nervous, then.  _ “Think we missed something?”

“I think she’s  _ up  _ to something, sure,” scoffed Kennedy, irritably. “Dunno if it’s got anything to do with our plans, though.”

“To be honest,” said Matt, tiredly, as he ran a hand through his hair, “I kind of hope it doesn’t. Season three’s looking complicated enough as it is.”

“Yeah, like, I  _ get  _ that,” persisted Kennedy, fussing with her sleeve buttons. “But what if The Department’s still all up in our grill?”

“Then we deal with it,” he replied, as placatingly as he could without being patronizing. “We’ve put up with Parker before.” 

“And that bastard fake Wilmarth.” Matt couldn’t help but laugh. Kennedy shot him a filthy look. “Oh, shut up.”

“It’s probably nothing to worry about,” he said, quietly, still smiling. He reached out and took Kennedy’s hand in his, stroking the back of it with one thumb in slow, calming circles. As the tension in Kennedy’s shoulders gave way he squeezed gently, encouragingly. “And even if it is, we’ll handle it  _ together _ .”

“Is that a promise?” Kennedy fixed him with such a look of sincerity that Matt had to swallow, and hope that the dim lighting hid his blush. He nodded, squeezing her hand again.

“I promise. Whatever woo-woo shit’s going on this time, we’ll face it together. You and me against the world and whatever’s supposedly beyond it.” He pulled a face. “‘Sides, I can’t see Willet being in any  _ real  _ danger if The Department’s got their eye on him. They might be all as mad as a sack of badgers, but at least they know what to do if this Niyar… Nartha…”

“Nyarlathotep,” commented Kennedy, too casually.

_ She always  _ was  _ good with the weird names in the mysteries we investigate. That one’s  _ particularly  _ weird, though.  _ He didn’t want to think too hard about how easily it came to Kennedy. She had seen things, when Barbara Sayers and Dr Allen’d had her in their clutches. Matt knew better than to push her for details, knew that she’d talk about all of that when she was good and ready.  _ And she might never be good and ready. I have to be  _ fine  _ with that.  _

“Right, him.” Matt shrugged, pushing the thoughts to the back of his mind for now. Task at hand, and all that shit. “They’re no more keen for those lunatics to have anything to do with him than we are.”

“Assuming they’re not all just a bunch of crazy cultists in tin foil hats.”

Matt sighed. “Well we know they’re at least a  _ little  _ right about something.” Kennedy glared at him, and he held up a placating hand. “I’m just saying.  _ You’re  _ the one that doesn’t believe in coincidences.”

“Right.” She frowned. “Which just brings us back around to Jonathan Willet. He was Ward’s doctor, Thomas Marsten’s… what if it turns out he’s in my fucked up family tree too or something?”

“I’m pretty sure you don’t have to worry about  _ that _ !” laughed Matt, reaching once more for his computer mouse. He shook it about to turn off the screensaver, saving what he was working on and then pushing himself to his feet as he put the computer into sleep mode. “C’mon. Let’s go to the café,” he suggested, “clear our heads a little, eh?” Placing the newspaper face down on the desk, he offered Kennedy a hand to hop down from the desk. “Argue over how much milk is the right amount of milk for a coffee instead.”

“ _ No  _ milk is the right amount of milk,” sniffed Kennedy. But she took Matt’s offered hand, and messed with her ponytail until it was sitting right on her head, before offering him her arm to loop in his head.

“We’ll have to agree to disagree,” commented Matt, fondly. Reassured for now, Kennedy shook her head in dismay.

“One day, Matthew Heawood, I'll get you to drink coffee the  _ right  _ way.”

“And when that day comes,” he chuckled, fishing the studio keys from his pocket as they picked up their coats, “I expect we’ll both retire from shock.”

“Retire…” Kennedy shook her head, and then punched him on the shoulder. “Like  _ you’ll  _ ever do that.”

“Well, stranger things have happened.”

“That they have,” she agreed, as the two walked arm in arm down the stairs and out to the bustling London streets beyond. “Really,  _ really  _ fucking stranger things have happened…”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jonathan Willet considers - not especially coherently - the kind of mess The Department of Works is going to get him into.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is all set somewhere between 2 and 3. It was never meant to be a series so updates will be... sporadic, and perhaps end without warning.

It turned out that what the visitor had done to his eyes in Broadmoor was not a permanent fix. (He did not, in fact, want to think too hard about how it had happened. She had said something about other realms and tooling about in his mind to make him  _ see  _ things, and he hallucinated more than enough on his own.) And so as a strange woman working for a strange organization took him to a strange place, Jonathan Willet sat silently and blindly in the back of a strange car, contemplating his fate.

They’d taken the cuffs off him once he was in the car, and told him to make himself comfortable. The windows were dark, he could just about tell; not that it mattered, when he couldn’t see anything. They seemed to have been twisting and turning down London streets for hours before the road surface changed and it seemed as though they’d hit the highway.

The woman - who introduced herself, once they were on the road, as ‘just Parker’ - offered him a bottle of water and a sandwich, and he had both of them on his lap, not exactly certain what he was supposed to do with them.  _ Eat them, presumably.  _ It shouldn’t have been a difficult concept to grasp.

Nobody had told him what was going on. One day he had been talking to the woman about the Herald, the next he had been blind again, and then the day after that they’d told him he was being transferred. He hadn’t known it was by  _ her  _ until she had turned up masquerading as a psychiatrist, telling him to trust her. And he didn’t know what he expected, nor what he thought he deserved. He didn’t know if he was being taken to his death, or if he had just been broken out of jail and if so - by whom? People with code names, who claimed to understand what was beyond the veil? People, then, who were as mad as he was?

Good people, or bad people?

And what kind of people was  _ he _ ?

Today was not a particularly lucid day. He sat in the back of the car feeling every part a prisoner, still, scarcely aware of his own name, let alone anything else.  _ Whispers.  _ There were whispers, and there were voices telling him not to  _ listen  _ to the whispers and he giggled as he felt for the seal on the packaged sandwich, plastic edge almost slicing open his finger. With a mouthful of what turned out to be ham and cheese and pickle he tried to stop his mind from wandering, and wondered if he was going to die. If, perhaps, this was his final penance, for what he had done. 

_ Though I had to do it. _

“I had to.”

“Had to  _ what,  _ Dr Willet?” asked Parker, from the seat beside him. He shook his head, unwilling or incapable of answering.

_ It wasn’t Charles,  _ he told himself, delirious,  _ not anymore. Not Charles, not  _ Charles,  _ not my patient.  _ Him.  _ Only him.  _

“Dust,” he announced, “all dust.”

“Yes,” said Parker, impatience colouring her tone. “You’ve  _ said _ .”

“You don’t see it.” And it hadn’t been Lucy Hawthorne either, not by then; not when she had begun to chant, to show him where she went- “In my dreams, in my  _ dreams… _ !” he mumbled to himself, shaking his head. “Where I go, where she went, where the Herald returns…”

“The Dream Lands.”

She said it calmly, matter of factly. Like this all made perfect sense to her. Jonathan laughed, and he heard the driver in the front of the car snort and grumble.

“You really think he’s sane enough to be useful, Parker?”

“I think he’s no madder than you or I, John.”

Jonathan narrowed his eyes, tipping his head to one side. The woman put a hand on his knee, patting condescendingly. “Not you, Dr Willet. My associate.”

“ _ Colleague, _ ” corrected the driver, gruffly. “Not that it matters, really. He’s hardly there. The lights are on,” he announced, the sound of his voice indicating that he’d returned his attention to the road, “but no one’s home!”

“Oh stuff it, Silence.”

“Silence…” mumbled Jonathan, eating his sandwich, losing his tentative hold on reality. Somehow all this sneaking around and Department and spy business seemed harder to swallow than what had driven him mad. “Silence, silence…”

“Can you shut him up?” grunted the driver. The doctor heard Parker kick the back of his chair. “Oi! Watch it!”

“Shut up and drive, alright? I’ll talk to him.”

“Parker,” declared Jonathan. He heard her move in her seat, crossing her legs. “He’s Silence. You’re Parker. I’m… who?”

“You’re Dr Willet,” she commented lightly, “unless I’ve made a real cock-up of things.”

“Parker, Silence, Herne, Babalon, none of those names,” insisted Jonathan, shaking his head, “none of them are real. I’m real. But if you’re not real, what’s real?”

“I assure you Dr Willet, it’ll all make sense when we get you back to our people.” She paused. “And I’m  _ pretty  _ sure I’m real.”

“But who  _ are  _ your people?” He gestured wildly with the bottle of water, starting to utterly lose his chain of thought. Jumping from topic to topic, fragment to fragment. “Who am  _ I  _ to you?”

Parker sighed deeply, as if she’d had to explain this a hundred times over and was preparing to do so again. “We’re The Department of Works, Dr Willet.  _ Probably  _ the good guys,  _ definitely  _ not in the Yellow Pages. Our job is to make sure that things like what happened to you…  _ don’t  _ happen.” She hummed thoughtfully. “Since we rather dropped the ball where Lucy Hawthorne was concerned and you know some things we do  _ not,  _ it’s in our mutual interests to have you over for a chat.”

“I killed her.”

“Ah, but it wasn’t her,” said Parker, carefully, “was it? You know that, don’t you?”

“Ip’qu Aya…”

“Exactly. The fact is Dr Willet you know too much to be left in Broadmoor to go slowly mad...er. More mad.” She laughed. “I’m sure you get it.”

“ _ Why _ ?”

“Because you were in rather the wrong place at precisely the wrong time, I’m afraid.” She tsked. “Like I said, we lost track at Amelia Fenner, and you beat us to Miss Hawthorne.”

“But it’s over.” Jonathan swallowed, a moment of sanity overtaking his leap-frogging as he chased the sandwich down with a gulp of fresh water.  _ This is all too much to take in; it cancelled out the crazy.  _ “I  _ killed _ her.”

“Unpleasant, but necessary.” Parker turned away as she spoke, voice quieter. “But, that Mystery Machine lot picked up on some connections we hadn’t made yet - so no rest for the wicked, and all the rest!”

Well, then, at least he was around the right company. ‘The Wicked’. He had killed (someone rest his soul, one day) and Parker was some sort of - of  _ magician _ or something, an occult practitioner. Not like Dr Allen,  _ not Dr Allen _ , he reassured himself,  _ Dr Allen is a dangerous man, shoot him on sight and dissolve his body in acid.  _ But she had also broken him out of Broadmoor, or at the very least pulled strings at a level of government that he couldn’t even imagine, and she knew of the Herald. Had read, by her own admission, the Necronomicon.

Jonathan should have been scared of her and of where he was going but if it was to join the ranks of the wicked… well, hadn’t he done so  _ already _ ?

What else did he have to lose?


End file.
